T3D Re: acuity enhanced with binocular vision

[Jim Crowell <crowell@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 7:54 AM -0800 3/19/98, john bercovitz wrote:
>So what's the mechanism of enhancement?  Was there any
>speculation?  My guess would be that the two images are
>being compared and anomalous disparities between eyes
>are being removed in processing.
>
>John B

John, I'm not quite sure what you mean by "anomolous disparities".  Since
these are acuity tests, the displays would've all been flat.

The most obvious reason for improvement would be the simple increase in the
number of samples (photons or neural impulses).  There's noise associated
with both images (photon noise & neural noise); the photon noise is
independent in the two eyes & the neural noise would be at least to some
extent, so you'd get some improvement just from doubling the number of
relevant photons.  Hard to say how much of an effect that'd predict,
especially for a letter acuity test (which is not by any means the simplest
measure of acuity)...

-Jim C.

----------------------
Jim Crowell
Caltech Division of Biology
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